Take a scenic countryside and fill it with billboards. You can calculate precisely the amount of profit that has thereby been created for advertising companies, and the associated rise in profits for the companies that attract more customers with the billboards. But what is the cost of the destruction of the scenic countryside view? Don’t ask! It would, of course, be something of a philosophical project to place an exact dollar value on the lost beauty. The bigger problem is that, in our economic system, we do not even try. Across our economy, externalities are simply ignored. Their costs fall on the public’s shoulders. This is not a novel observation— “privatize profits and socialize costs” is what makes the “too big to fail” business model so successful. What is remarkable is the extent to which our government regulations, our views of common sense business practices, and our whole conventional wisdom about the way that material progress should rationally unfold all seem to proceed calmly towards oblivion without even trying to calculate what should be on the “minus” side of the ledger. The failure to realize that ignoring these costs to public welfare does not make them disappear accounts for the nagging disquietude that enshittification creates in the public mind. Websites that used to be useful become morasses of scams and pop-up ads. But you can’t argue with the profits! Rather than build dense housing in urban areas, we build endless ugly, low-density sprawl. Land is cheap! We defund public schools and public transportation and public health services and watch corporations eagerly fill the gaps. The S&P is booming! And, yes, we gape at a beloved national sporting event that fails to make itself dramatically less enjoyable in the name of corporate branding. All that money they’re leaving on the table!
Pay no attention to the externalities behind the curtain.